Word file to Indesign style format help, please!

[Kerry Gavin]

I trying to find a way for a client to format text in Word which I will then
bring in to Indesign. I know how to set up style formats for tags I use like
body, sub, byline, byline, info, etc., but have two problems standing in the
way of making this process easier for the client, and me.

1.) If I've named a style "intro" and it consists of roman text, with a few
words italicized, they come in to indesign without the italics, the rest of
the formatting is OK. Can I solve this??

2. To reduce clutter in the formatting palette (for my clients sake, I like
him to only be able to see the actual styles I use, not Heading, 1, Heading,
2, etc., but word doesn't seem to want me to delete them. Is there any way
to get rid of what I don't need?

Thank you.

Kerry Gavin

 

[Elliott Roper]

I trying to find a way for a client to format text in Word which I will then
bring in to Indesign. I know how to set up style formats for tags I use like
body, sub, byline, byline, info, etc., but have two problems standing in the
way of making this process easier for the client, and me.

1.) If I've named a style "intro" and it consists of roman text, with a few
words italicized, they come in to indesign without the italics, the rest of
the formatting is OK. Can I solve this??

Have you tried using the character style "emphasis" instead of manually
setting some words in italic? I don't have a copy of Indesign at the
moment to check whether it honours emphasis.

Word and InDesign work wonderfully well together, so I do hope you and
you client get it sorted

2. To reduce clutter in the formatting palette (for my clients sake, I like
him to only be able to see the actual styles I use, not Heading, 1, Heading,
2, etc., but word doesn't seem to want me to delete them. Is there any way
to get rid of what I don't need?

You can't get rid of them, but you can achieve partial success by
hiding them. In the style panel, simply select 'user defined styles'. I
have not yet found a way to suppress the system styles in the
formatting palette (Word v.X)

The way I deal with that is to name all my frequently used styles with
a short alias, as in 'body,b', then to change to body (with the
formatting palette on screen to work around a mis-feature in v.X) I
type cmd-shift-s b <ret>. A bit if discussion with your customer might
find a happy way of working.

Clive Huggan, one of the MVPs, has done similar projects to what you
are doing. If he chimes in to say I'm talking rubbish, you better
believe him.

 

[Peter Edman]

Have you tried using the character style "emphasis" instead of manually
setting some words in italic? I don't have a copy of Indesign at the
moment to check whether it honours emphasis.

Word and InDesign work wonderfully well together, so I do hope you and
you client get it sorted

I have had good success with Word 2004 (and X) and InDesign CS, so long
as I recognize the different way they treat fonts.

I think ID CS does honor character styles. That's certainly one way to
do what you want here. It may be a better way in the long run, come to
think of it -- I frequently complain about losing italic formatting when
fussing with ID.

If you don't choose the character styles method:

When importing, I find that it is much better to adapt Word's own
pre-defined paragraph styles, since you can't really get rid of them.

But however you do it, consider pre-defining the same styles in InDesign
(formatting can be completely different, of course) -- the key is to
make sure you use the EXACT same capitalization and EXACT same name.
When you import, ID will then use its own version of the style name, not
Word's. It should do a better job with the italics then, too.

Also look and see if ID isn't keeping your italics but not displaying
them properly: it deals with italics in a markedly different manner than
Word does. Where Word adds an "Italic" property to the text, ID wants to
use the font "Goudy Oldstyle Italic" rather than just "Goudy" with an
italic added (and "Goudy Old Style" as the base font rather than plain
"Goudy," as in Word):

Thus if you are going from, say, Goudy to Frutiger, you have the problem
that there is no "Frutiger Oldstyle Italic" -- so ID sometimes gets
confused. I frequently see ID highlighting portions of my imported text
in pink because it can't display the font that it thinks I wanted. Look
at the Font usage and see if there is a little yellow triangle next to
one of the fonts; it may require manual adjustment (replace the faux
"Frutiger Oldstyle Italic" with "Frutiger Italic") and then you should
see your italics properly.

Hope this helps

Cheers
Peter E.

 

[Kerry Gavin]

Elliot,

I tried your "emphasis" style idea for creating italic, bold, etc that
Indesign would recognize. It almost works. Indesign respects the ital, but
either bases it on the underlying font (not the one called for in my
Indesign doc). This is for a magazine and there are loads of styles, so I
can't have my client searching for "body indent italic" character style in
one paragraph and "callout italic" in another. It gets too confusing.

I think that your User defined styles will work for us and I thank you for
that (if I can get this other part figured out).

Thanks,

Kerry


Any other suggestions (from you or anyone?)

 

[Elliott Roper]

Also look and see if ID isn't keeping your italics but not displaying
them properly: it deals with italics in a markedly different manner than
Word does. Where Word adds an "Italic" property to the text, ID wants to
use the font "Goudy Oldstyle Italic" rather than just "Goudy" with an
italic added (and "Goudy Old Style" as the base font rather than plain
"Goudy," as in Word):

For the avoidance of doubt, Word does change fonts when it can, rather
than just whacking a slant on the roman font. It does so whether you
choose emphasis character style or apply italic manually with a cmd-I

Thus if you are going from, say, Goudy to Frutiger, you have the problem
that there is no "Frutiger Oldstyle Italic" -- so ID sometimes gets
confused. I frequently see ID highlighting portions of my imported text
in pink because it can't display the font that it thinks I wanted. Look
at the Font usage and see if there is a little yellow triangle next to
one of the fonts; it may require manual adjustment (replace the faux
"Frutiger Oldstyle Italic" with "Frutiger Italic") and then you should
see your italics properly.

I wouldn't argue with that. I'm pretty sure I have seen that too.

I really ought to stop being a skinflint and buy a copy of ID. I do one
InDesign job per year, and so far I have got it out the door with the
free trial still with days to spare! It is a very capable piece of
software and takes up the slack where Word gives up on getting the
typography and the layout just perfect.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Elliot,

I tried your "emphasis" style idea for creating italic, bold, etc that
Indesign would recognize. It almost works. Indesign respects the ital, but
either bases it on the underlying font (not the one called for in my
Indesign doc). This is for a magazine and there are loads of styles, so I
can't have my client searching for "body indent italic" character style in
one paragraph and "callout italic" in another. It gets too confusing.

You are right about that.
Surely that will work if your Word and ID styles of the same name share
the same font name exactly (see Peter's excellent post)

I tried making a new kind of emphasis with the 'based on' changed to
(underlying properties) but it was no better in that it would not
respect a manual font change in the paragraph and still went for the
standard font of the paragraph + italic. Bummer!

I guess you are buggered if you can't let the client have access to the
fonts and set the styles on Word to be as close as possible to those of
the same name in ID.

You /could/ try for a naming convention, like a character style
abbreviated alias called 'ci' for use when italicised callout style was
required. (Hmm.. I hope your client is a patient person ;-) )

Please post back with how you get on. I'm very interested in whether
you get this working neatly for the next time I have to go InDesigning.

 

[Kerry Gavin]

I just recently changed designing the magazine in Quark to doing it in
Indesign. The client had supplied me with text files and tagged the text
with Quark convention (the beginning of a style -- @style name:blah, blah,
and then <B>word<B> for words bolded within a paragraph, or <I>word<I> for
words to be italicized). Mae things easy for me, and after 15 years, the
client understands this.

But, times being what they are and production budgets shrinking, less help
for the client in preparing his copy to send to us, and our design studio
not able to raise our rates for the last couple of years, I was hoping that
Indesign would give me even more opportunity to quickly get the text into
the right format with less work on our (designers) end and their (client
side) end.

The editor has multiple story sources, so has to bring in, tag or format
articles and then send them to us. I am trying to make things easier for
him, which makes us look better.

I just seems like I'm missing the obvious, and Word and Indesign should be
able to play well together and make things easier.

I'm confused.

For sure.

Thanks for everyone's' help and if there are any other ideas out there, I'd
love to hear them. . . I need to make this a painless process.

Kerry

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

I would think that Indesign forums or the InDesign help would be a more
useful place to ask what needs to be done, or magazine production
forums--obviously lots of people must be importing Word into InDesign, but
most of them don't appear to be on this newsgroup.

This newsletter by an InDesign user has a little snippet about this problem,
with a link to useful utilities that they say help. Perhaps that site will
also help direct you to some good forums?

<http://senecadesign.com/tips-pubs/archives/dg-archives.html?dg-content=/tip
s-pubs/archives/dg/designgeek25.html>
Scroll to middle, subject Editorium: DesignGeek for Editors

 

[Kerry Gavin]

I've just sent a question to the Adobe newsgroup to see how I fare over
there. If I get any news, I will post it back here.

Thanks to everyone for their attempts at help!

Kerry

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

I've just sent a question to the Adobe newsgroup to see how I fare over
there. If I get any news, I will post it back here.

Thanks, please do, especially useful links and resources...I'm hoping to
venture into InDesign in the next few months as well....

DM